A good leader, let’s say a team leader, has most likely begun their journey as a regular employee. They’ve achieved their current position thanks to hard work, smart decisions, and personal qualities. This experience is, of course, a valuable resource. Yet, it can also make a person vulnerable to certain traps and biases.
1. Encouraging Overwork
Aiming high is essential to get a promotion. You’ve become who you are exactly because of your hard work. Now, you expect employees to work equally hard and constantly push for more. Fair enough, isn’t it? Well, it may be fair but it’s also counterproductive because overwork always (without exceptions!) leads to burnout. Initially, productivity may spike, indeed, but, in the long run, it always leads to errors, irritation, and high turnover rates. Plus, it’s just now safe.
Sometimes, the situation is a bit different. The leader doesn’t encourage overwork among others but works excessively themselves. They think they’ve got an immunity to all those adverse effects because they are experienced. In reality, no one’s immune to burnout.
Of course, relaxing isn’t as easy as it sounds. Many leaders find that even when they have time to rest, their minds keep running. It is hard to truly unwind either at the mental or body level. If that’s the case, here are a few strategies that may help.
- Natural Supplements
If relaxing doesn’t come naturally, natural supplements can be helpful. For example, you can buy Delta-8 flower or CBD gummies. As opposed to other popular supplements such as chamomile or magnesium, these provide immediate effects.
- Breathing Exercises
This may sound difficult but, in practice, it’s not. The basic technique is to inhale, hold, and exhale for 4 counts each. It’s very powerful.
- Create a Ritual
You need to train your brain to perceive some activities (e.g., making tea, reading, walking) as signals of relaxation. These should be things you enjoy doing (preferably, different from what you do at work).
2. Becoming Biased Due to Friendships
Isn’t it good to form friendships with team members? Of course, it is! Unless it leads to favoritism. The latter will certainly undermine the team morale, cause conflicts, or inner resentment. For you, your friend is an excellent specialist who deserves promotions and favorable projects. For others, they are employees who enjoy cool perks because of relationships with you.
Even if your friend is, indeed, a top performer, it will be hard to act as their manager at times. For example, there will be moments when you’ll have to provide negative feedback to them, ask them to correct mistakes, or compare their work to that of other employees. It should be pretty challenging to stay unbiased under those scenarios. This checklist may help a bit (the key difficulty is to answer 100% honestly):
- My friend has the best skillset among other employees for the tasks I assign to them.
- I use the same metrics when deciding about my friend’s and other employees’ promotions.
- I don’t soften feedback: my friend receives the same performance reviews as other employees do.
- There haven’t been any indirect or direct signs of resentment among team members related to task distribution.
- I never schedule meetings or deadlines based on my friend’s preferences.
3. Accepting Stress as a Norm
This one is directly related to overload. Lots of tasks, tough deadlines — when you start accepting these as a norm, you start accepting stress as an integral part of it. Yet, stress is no way normal. Those leaders who do nothing about it, see decreased morale and increased absenteeism in their teams pretty soon.
If you see your employees are stressed, don’t take it for granted. Ask them how you can help, teach them ways to deal with it, try to remove the causes of stress (if that’s possible).
4. Become Uninterested in Change
When you grow, you change. When you become a leader, you may start thinking that you have grown up enough professionally and so, it’s okay to stay at the current level. It’s not. Leaders who resist change might become complacent. Their teams should become so too or simply feel uninspired. Don’t fall into this trap:
- ask team members to innovate and do what you can to support them
- encourage feedback
- seek improvement.
5. Falling into Confirmation Bias
We all tend to favor information that supports our beliefs (at least, to an extent). In leadership, this always leads to mistakes. You don’t see the real picture; only the one you’ve invented.
It’s pretty challenging to get rid of the confirmation bias. The best trick here is to always seek arguments or evidence that disprove your assumptions. The stronger the assumptions, the more they need disproval.
***
All in all, it’s smart to stay flexible. Don’t think you’ve learned it all, be kind to others and yourself, and encourage a healthy environment in the first place.
